There are dozens ways that one can get their music out there for other people to hear and in this post, I would want to talk about a couple of the options available to us that the members of this forum have kind of accepted and used in the past and serve as a couple of different ways to share their music with us.

The first step would be to depend on the basic format that we want to share, either audio only or video with audio. The majority of people who do share their music with other board members here in general have accepted two methods.

SoundCloud is a service that does a lot of very cool things, however, the part that interests us the most is it's ability to let you upload an MP3 file and share it with your friends here, by posting a link that if clicked on, lets us hear your music through your web browser of choice.

YouTube is a well known site, it permits you to upload video files and then provides you with several ways to share your video either via providing a link or even embedding an entire video into a post here on the forum.

Both SoundCloud and YouTube are free services, but do require that you create an account there before you are able to upload and share, however, most of the time, this is a very easy thing to do. Unless I am requested to, I won't go through the steps of how to open an account with each service.

Later on today, I will return and modify this post (or create another post), that details a couple of options of how to create that MP3 file or video and upload it to your service of choice and how to share the results of all your hard work for your friends to enjoy.

Just a couple of comments: I like SoundCloud as the sound quality is good and the memory requirements of audio only files are far less than for videos on YouTube. Also a reasonable number of people search on SoundCloud looking for followers, some obviously to try to push up some meaningless statistic, others genuinely want to make contact with other musicians, and I've come across some good music that way. The software only records a listen when someone has heard the whole thing so if you are a glory hunter YouTube will give you more hits. You can have three hours for free, then after that you have to pay, which currently stops me from putting more on: what I should really do is archive the worst recordings then I would be fine. There have been intermittent problems with getting onto the site in particular from older operating systems.

YouTube: sound quality is worse and you have to post a video so more memory is needed and (worse still in my case) people can see what you look like. If you are sensitiive bear in mind that some people may "dislike" your video, in my case a very reasonable reaction. It is completely free which is great. If you are better looking and a better player than me you may have a tiny chance to go viral.

Facebook: there is a lot of Italian accordion music that is Facebook only. As far as I can see the players don't see it as music for recording, they tend to see it as live music and post the Facebook videos as a fun record of an event more than as a finished product in itself. This is great if you follow some good players, but it also means it's very hard to find stuff from the past as it's hidden somewhere in the depths of someone's timeline. I love following the players on Facebook but I wouldn't post my own recording their if I wanted it to be found.

Finally the penny just dropped that you can just attach an mp3 to your post. This is quite attractive to me as a way of sharing a recording with the forum e.g. for comments. This is what I plan to do with some stuff I am working on now.

I will be doing tutorials on 3-4 methods that I think are good alternatives for people to share music, so people have not just a choice, but will have a bit of a better idea how to do it.

Hopefully more people will later chime in and add how they are doing it or talk about what they do differently as well. With a little luck, more people will start to post their work/progress because they will see how easy and fun it is.

The advantage to this system is that we have total control over the file locally, so if we want to delete it, we just delete the file locally, DropBox deletes it from it's cloud-based servers and it is gone. Another advantage is that it has a free service that lets you use up to 2.25gb of files.

Disadvantage... you have to have the files locally, so if you delete them by accident, they are deleted everywhere and non-accessible anymore. If you recopy it back, the link changes, so for us to see it here, the link in the post would have to be reposted. Also, you need to have a program that can play the file format that is uploaded, like in this case, you need an application that can play MP3 files.

Here is the 2nd video of how to use SoundCloud.com. Very similar to DropBox except users do not need to have any special programs installed other than a web browser, so I suppose that would be advantage #1. It's pretty easy to use and people can upload and delete files quite easily. The disadvantage here is that as soon as you upload something there, you give SoundCloud full rights to let them basically do anything they want with your files, including selling it for profit. This is a copy/paste of their terms of use "you hereby grant such licenses to SoundCloud on a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid basis."

Not important if you are an amateur, but if you are a professional, you just gave away rights to SoundCloud to sell your work and give you nothing... keep that in mind.

Another limitation is the 180 minute maximum. Unless you upgrade to the "paid" version, you are limited to 180 minutes of total time. So for example, if all your songs are 10 minutes in duration a piece, you are limited to a maximum of 18 files. No problem... delete a couple older files and you can add a few more.

I made it a habit to install because I could just dump files (mostly client photos) in there on my laptop and not need an internet connection (for example, sending emails and setting up photos while flying). It would automatically sync as soon as it connected to any ISP without further prompting. Same goes for deleting files, if it was removed from the PUBLIC folder, it was rendered unavailable, no need to log in, and the operation was completed as soon as I connected.

But yes, of course, for like 99% of the people the web interface is good enough.

I've found Soundcloud very easy to use. As a total newb to recording and the likes, I just wanted to record my progress and with little kit, I found an excellent app recorder for my phone. Audiocopy. Great for recording on the fly with a basic editor and it's set up to send directly to soundcloud. A handy option if you want to go mobile. You can even upgrade your microphone capabilities with a mobile plug in mic.